Merci Samuel. I thought it might have something to do with the types of serial ports defined in the kernels include/linux/serial.h. Btw, it defines PORT_MAX as 13. Not sure if this is the same thing, but I was unable to detect my dectalk via my pci express serial card after changing it to 13. Actually, if I comment out that whole if block including the check for the error, speakup_dectlk does report that it found the dectalk on ttyS0, but it only says, ""DecTalk Express ready" in a very sick sounding voice. If I uncomment the below around line 79 of serialio.c, it does print "in irq" many times in the logs and eventually says, "Too many timeouts, deactivating speakup." /*printk(KERN_ERR "in irq\n"); */ /*pr_warn("in IRQ\n"); */ So, it looks like there is more to the problem. Btw, I changed the values of ttyS0 to 0xCC00 and 16 for the i/o address and irq respectively in the kernels arch/x86/include/asm/serial.h file to match the output of setserial /dev/ttyS0 -a On Wed, 30 Jun 2010, Samuel Thibault wrote: > Trevor Astrope, le Wed 30 Jun 2010 13:47:36 -0400, a ?crit : >> Does anyone know what the value 8 refers to in the synth_request_region >> calls in serio.c? > > The number of io ports, starting from the base. > > Samuel > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup > >